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Review: Katherine Balch doesn’t think a concerto is just for the soloist

Joshua KosmanMay 6, 2019Updated: May 7, 2019, 9:20 am

Violinist Robyn Bollinger with Donato Cabrera and the California Symphony in the world premiere of Katherine Balch’s violin concerto “Artifacts” on Sunday, May 5. Photo: Art Garcia

One of the things they teach you in composer school is that a concerto is mostly supposed to be a vehicle for the soloist, giving the violinist or pianist great bursts of virtuoso display designed to leave the audience gasping in amazement — or at least impressed. The orchestra has its say too, of course, but its role is secondary.

Composer Katherine Balch has some other ideas on that subject.

Balch’s wonderful new violin concerto, “Artifacts,” had its world premiere at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek on Sunday, May 5, as part of the season-ending concert by the California Symphony under music director Donato Cabrera. The 25-minute piece featured plenty of opportunities for the soloist — violinist Robyn Bollinger, a thoughtful performer and also a school chum of Balch’s — to show off her technical prowess and communicative eloquence.

But perhaps just as notable is the skill with which Balch writes for the orchestra, filling her score with engaging instrumental knickknacks and nuggets of imaginative whimsy that come at the listener from every corner of the stage. She’s like some kind of musical Thomas Edison — you can just hear her tinkering around in her workshop, putting together new sounds and textural ideas.

That inventiveness was on display a year ago, when Balch began a three-year stint as the orchestra’s composer-in-residence with a short curtain-raiser called “Like a Broken Clock.” It established Balch’s love of musical machinery, in all its off-kilter delight, but it also came off more as a preparatory exercise — a collection of musical devices to be used later — than a fully formed musical work.

“Artifacts” takes some of those ideas, and many more, and puts them to expressive use. The orchestral writing is buoyant and puckish (if you’ve never heard a violin section tapping gently on their instruments with thimbles on their fingers, this is your chance); the soloist sometimes takes the spotlight and sometimes seems to be along for the ride.

The piece is in four movements, each inspired by a specific masterpiece of the repertoire for unaccompanied violin. The music of Luciano Berio informs the monomaniacal focus of the first movement, which comes at a single note from a wide variety of angles before exploding in a kind of rock ‘n’ roll frenzy. Movements based on the work of Eugène Ysaÿe and Salvatore Sciarrino take up the second half of the concerto, with more detailed solo passages and a ferocious cadenza.

But the concerto’s lustrous, beating heart is its second movement, after the Capriccio No. 6 of Paganini. Here the violinist does almost nothing but sustain a long trill — but it’s a trill full of color and variety, which the soloist turns as if holding a jewel up to the light. The orchestra, meanwhile, whispers sweet enchantments into the audience’s ear, from little ticktock insinuations to gently smeared tonal harmonies. It’s a short but breathtakingly beautiful stretch, which Cabrera and the orchestra rendered superbly.

Bollinger, here and throughout, was a formidable interpreter of her friend’s work, rattling off fierce and shapely passagework or letting her violin dart pleasingly in and out of the orchestral tapestry. As an encore — as if to recognize the most famous bit of solo violin music that Balch had left out of her concerto — Bollinger gave a limpid and exquisitely tender account of the Largo from Bach’s Sonata No. 3 in C, BWV 1005.

The second half of the concert was devoted to Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony — a challenging undertaking for any regional orchestra, no matter how ambitious or artistically driven. The composer’s big musical architecture can feel overblown unless it’s rendered with tonal solidity and unified rhythms.

Those qualities were there in the first movement, which glowed with an inner warmth derived from the all-important brass section, and toward the end of the finale, which summed everything up with a mighty blast. The inner movements, though, needed more polish and unanimity than they got.